How America’s War On Technology Is About To Backfire

Technology is scary.

Sometimes it’s scary for a very good reason — and sometimes it’s scary just because it’s scary.

But we have to tell the difference between the two, because if we don’t, we’ll either destroy our own brains or we will destroy our entire economy.

New technology is always scary because we’re not sure exactly what to do with it. The temptation is always to kill it — to burn it with fire. Sometimes I’m sympathetic to this particular temptation.

The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing look creepy and weird. There were gigantic lines of robots dancing and walking in unison, with varying levels of competence.

One robot fought another robot and then broke out into a victory dance. One of the robots fell down and broke, which, I have to admit, made me laugh.

But the robots will get better — and creepier.

On Wednesday, Facebook signed a gigantic settlement with 29 states to put some new restrictions on the use of its technology for children.

Let’s be clear. Social media is disastrous for kids’ brains. It acts like a drug; it addicts them.

That’s what it’s designed to do, in much the same way that nicotine is addictive. Social media is addictive. It has hacked our brains and found dopamine-release features with access to dopamine with a few easy hand motions.

Kids pick up on this stuff quite rapidly. If you ever leave a two-year-old child in proximity to an iPad, the kid will find it, start manipulating it, and become addicted to it. Their eyes glaze over. They turn into little zombies.

It’s a real issue. Many brain studies document this.

You know this yourself if you have ever doom-scrolled X. It was literally training you to get that small dopamine release so that you’d want to do it again and again.

But all of this is making you stupid. It was designed to make you stupid because it was designed to be addictive and make you want to watch more.

The algorithmic feed is dangerous; it feeds you what you want to see. It’s one of the reasons why if you click on a particular video on YouTube, you get fed a bunch of similar content. It’s how you end up down crazy rabbit holes in the online space.

It’s why young people seem so siloed in their information, everything from news to entertainment.

I think there should be heavy-handed regulation on social media; you should be banned from social media completely until you are of age. I do not think minors need or have the right to social media.

Social media is a disaster area. It’s terrible for kids in every way. It’s up to the parent to make sure our kids don’t engage in it.

My 12-year-old constantly says she wants nothing to do with it. As she gets older, I hope that remains. But lots of other parents just aren’t as involved.

A weird residue of how people currently perceive technology is that they’re actually warmer toward Facebook and Instagram than toward technologies that will transform the American economy.

There’s an overall unease about AI. Even though artificial intelligence could save the American economy. AI boosts productivity. 

You know this yourself if you use ChatGPT or other AI avenues. The time it would take me to research particular data questions through things like Google is so much longer than simply using ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.

It boggles the mind. It is significantly more efficient to synthesize information using AI. This is true in a wide variety of arenas. The uses for AI are legion and often excellent.

According to the Dallas Federal Reserve, quoting Goldman Sachs, you could see a massive boost in American productivity somewhere between 0.3 and 3.0 percentage points a year over the next decade, with a median estimate of 1.5 percentage points.

Yet, at the same time, you have a lot of people who are catastrophists about technology and often favor centralized control. Bill Gates is ripping AI and suggesting that mass numbers of jobs will be wiped out.

We have not seen mass numbers of jobs wiped out, and my suspicion is that you will see jobs lost, but you will also see an enormous number of jobs gained. Jobs will change.

I think that this technology will bleed into the public gradually, a little bit slower than people think. Gates said in an interview, “The technology has crossed dangerous thresholds in biology, cybersecurity, white-collar work, and human relationships.”

Three years ago, he said that the coming bumpy AI job disruption would lead to a manageable transition in technology and would help people work efficiently. Now he says it will wreak economic catastrophe with far fewer jobs than exist today.

He says that if AI continues unchecked, society will turn against it entirely. But Gates has spent his career since founding Microsoft dooming and gloom-mongering. It took him years to acknowledge that his doomsday view of global warming was unrealistic.

He was wrong about the climate accords. He was wrong about the widespread Covid vaccine. He was wrong about a bunch of things. But now people are jumping on the bandwagon with him.

We should acknowledge that a bunch of people in the AI space want the government to step in and heavily regulate AI so they can capture the market.

The effect of all this is that people get freaked out because you have the heads of these AI companies telling you to be doomers, and you have a bunch of politicians who are going around catering to the freaked-out rather than trying to explain what exactly is happening.

You end up in politics with this bizarre increase in hatred for data centers, which are simply places that process an enormous amount of data. Because people are afraid of AI, they are afraid of the data centers, and because politicians are afraid of the people, they respond by cracking down on the data centers.

There is good tech, and there’s bad tech. Not all tech is created the same.

The promises of social media were basically a giant lie. They promised more friendship. They delivered far more antipathy. They promised more information, and they delivered a bunch of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and slop. They promised connection. Instead they often delivered addiction.

Kids have been feeling the consequences of this for a decade and a half, and it’s been a disaster.

But I don’t think that’s true of AI. If we would like to destroy ourselves, what we should do is free up social media and restrict AI. We should be cracking down on social media for the sake of particularly young people who are vulnerable to the addictive qualities.

We should ensure the worst excesses of AI are avoided, but we should not try to hamstring AI so we lose to the Chinese. They are not stopping for a moment.

AI can work for us in ways that help all of us.